Comment les politiques publiques favorisent-elles les dynamiques collaboratives d’innovation ?. Analyse du management de l’intermédiation territoriale

This contribution is part of an attempt to clarify the roles of public policy measures in bringing innovation and territorial development closer together. The cross-fertilization of a literature in management sciences and in regional science enables to highlight the role of intermediary stakeholders in the relationship between business strategies and those of territories. Based on an extensive literature in collaborative innovation intermediation, intermediary practices are examined in order to better understand how their use potentially develops geographic and/or organized proximity between economic stakeholders and hereby foster collaborative dynamics of innovation in a given territory. We rely on an empirical qualitative study of two public policy measures, four competitiveness clusters and six French Techs on different French territories, which enable us to identify actual practices of territorial intermediation. Our findings show that most of the territorial intermediation practices that were emphasized by the respondents can be related to the intermediary functions highlighted in the literature on innovation in management sciences. However, some additional functions specific to territorial intermediation are also pinpointed. From a more theoretical point of view, the study confronts the notion of innovation intermediation applied to the territory and brings out more broadly the potential contributions of an understanding of the territorial dynamics, more specifically when it comes to the construction of relations of proximity between territorial actors. Our study contributes to this understanding and hereby supports public stakeholders in their decision-making when it comes to investing in collaborative innovation dynamics on their territory